Commander Blood: https://youtu.be/e9nOYM6nSXo?t=39
With an intro like that I could NEVER forget this one. That and the fact that this game did not crash constantly like my missing game did lol.
Too bad it didn't sell well, those French dev create the most unique stuff but sometimes it is too unique for the mainstream.
Off to listen to Oxygène.
Check out the map around 15:00 and the planet landing around 16:21.
See my comment here for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258294
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Honestly I cannot remember scenes correctly. It was super unique to me at the time but the constant crashes prevented me from playing it throughly even though it remained in my mind.
Another thing I can add was that there was FMV scenes with humans I think. I also think there were cyberpunk elements but not sure. I specifically chose the above CGI image because it reminds me of the game.
When I say point and click I mean a game like how Myst operates.
My hope is that if I ever find it, with my tech skills that I didn't have as a kid, I can hopefully repair the game so it does not crash(or at least research if someone else has fixed it)
EDIT: Others have kindly gotten me to think of more details of this game. I am collecting them here:
1) The game shipped on a CD, I think the CD had a lot of "Blue" on it. As in the label had a lot of the color Blue. Sorry, I'm trying to dig deep into my head as much as I can.
2) The game was a point and click in the style of Myst. Specifically pre-rendered CGI Images where you would click to progress through the level. Occasional FMVs with real humans would appear.
3) It has a similar setting to Blade Runner (1997): https://youtu.be/9KSqIDxtB4U?t=2427 but again the game didn't operate like Blade Runner, it operated like Myst.
4) This was definitely some sort of Win32 application (ie. runs on Windows 95/98 and not DOS) and so the graphics imitate a game like Myst and not those old VGA DOS games.
E.g. there are games that I couldn’t remember, one was a quest(?) in a set of pictures and a submarine, dark tones, mysterious. I remember a full outside view of it and then few screens inside.
Another was a dos game that had a fullscreen map of some galaxy and a cursor in a form of a torn hand. Five blobs below the map were unnamed(?) buttons on a strange panel. One button sent you flying through a “canyon” on a selected planet, which was drawn as a set of simple \_/ planes slightly offset from each other, synthwave style-ish but much simpler. I believe it was an early rogue like, but I was too young and knew no english to understand it.
I don’t get how one can remember something but not have any details except a period of release.